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“... looks as though Schulz could barely identify himself with reality, let alone with the Jews,’ Philip Roth once observed to Isaac Bashevis Singer. He was using the terms of a famous joke of disavowal in Kafka’s diaries: ‘What have I in common with the Jews? I have hardly anything in common with myself.’ It’s true that Schulz was born into a ...”

“... literature have been Thomas Pynchon and Don DeLillo, prophets of Cold War paranoia, rather than Philip Roth and Jonathan Franzen, or all the chroniclers of the immigrant experience from Henry Roth to Jhumpa Lahiri. Pynchon and DeLillo have had oddly few successors, even though the end of the Cold War, with the ...”

“... Thomas Pynchon, William Gass. Thanks to the work of this group and the self-named characters of Philip Roth, we might well brace ourselves for archness or emotional coolness (rather than sincerity, warmth and optimistic political engagement) at the first sign of a self-referential conceit. But Lerner is doing something different with his metafictional ...”

“... their work has such overarching formal and intellectual coherence. It’s possibly true of, say, Philip Roth, from Goodbye, Columbus to Nemesis, but Anthony Burgess? If you like A Clockwork Orange you’ll love Inside Mr Enderby? Or Margaret Atwood? If you like The Handmaid’s Tale you’ll love Alias Grace? With Banks, you knew what you were getting ...”

“... David Bells and Jack Gladneys of the later books. To think, DeLillo could have been an Italian Philip Roth, with the Bronx as his Newark. (‘Take the “A” Train’, from 1962, even includes a scene of an Italian wedding. Its overall frame – a man takes to the subway in flight from loansharks – anticipates the opening of Libra, where Oswald ...”

“... as a reminder of the Kingsley Amis who once unambiguously remarked, in the course of a berating of Philip Roth, that ‘Jewish jokes are not funny.’ Then there is the woman question, which arises in the novel in a fashion which sets us wondering, as in the past and as in the case of the above encounter, which parts of the bad behaviour on display Amis ...”

“... remarkable philosophical meditation, often poignant in its belatedness; and as a letter to Philip Roth. ‘The history of Jewish literacy: now there is a delicate subject!’ Wieseltier exclaims. ‘It turns out that rabbis have been complaining for centuries that the book has often been closed to the people of the book.’ It might seem a bit ...”

“... clothes before deciding it’s premature: ‘He will need a raincoat when he comes back.’ When Philip Roth published his autobiography The Facts in 1989, after three decades of writing fiction, he attributed it to an ‘exhaustion with masks, disguises, distortions and lies … I needed clarification, as much of it as I could get – demythologising ...”

“... have been successful, well-known novelists and writers over the age of 70: Vidal, Norman Mailer, Philip Roth, Arthur Schlesinger, Susan Sontag and Joan Didion among them. Jaundiced about American good intentions, unaffected by the roar of sentimentality after 9/11, they saw what armies of better informed, younger journalists couldn’t or refused to ...”

“... great social explorations of Doris Lessing or with the ludic excavations of Angela Carter. Or with Philip Roth, Gabriel García Márquez or Kingsley Amis. What now seems striking is how utterly beyond this Bainbridge was. If she is to be seen as part of any tradition it is one that is long-standing, wide-ranging, little considered. The wits. I would put ...”

“... his prescient opening staves: Aficionados of the modern American novel have learned to look to Philip Roth for complex literary constructions that play wittily with narrative voice and frame. One thinks of such Roth works as My Life as a Man and The Counterlife. Now Saul Bellow has demonstrated that among his other ...”

“... less politically oriented in his criticism than some of his New York contemporaries (Irving Howe, Philip Rahv, Clement Greenberg), and certainly less dogmatic – this is one of the reasons he never found Partisan Review congenial. A little surprisingly, given Kazin’s temperamental prickliness versus Howe’s gentle, social-democratic disposition, you were ...”

“... there must be an element of strangeness and exoticism in his work. You could call Saul Bellow, Philip Roth and Cynthia Ozick Jewish writers, but they are also American writers. Singer never attempts to present a Gentile sensibility; in this whole volume there are hardly any Gentiles and only one with more than a walk-on part. The stories fall into ...”

“... and adult as everything else of Konwicki’s; and A Dreambook of Our Time, once chosen by Philip Roth for his Penguin series ‘The Other Europe’, but long unobtainable. (My own copy of it has gone missing, but I remember it as a slightly flowery rooming-house novel about zero-hour Poland.) It seems barbaric to ignore any books by a foreign ...”

“... Did this put him beyond all possibility of acceptance or belonging? An alien? In The Human Stain, Philip Roth showed us Coleman Silk, a black man whose whole life had been a shoring-up of a place of greater safety for himself as a member of the white intelligentsia, a person who sought to put his secret self permanently out of sight in order to live as ...”